Hellhound on My Trail (7 page)

Couldn’t quit drinking, of course.

“It’s a marker,” Eddie said. “Like a code. Like blood on the doorposts on Passover. Let him who has ears hear.”

“A tree?” Mike followed Jim and the others ahead, through a series of quick turns. The passages all looked the same to him, carved sandstone bricks like he was inside one of the pyramids of Egypt, and he had to trust that Jim was on the right track.

“The tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Eddie said. “The tree that is the candlestick that is the woman that is the river, et cetera. Not to sound too much like Adrian.”

“All that stuff is the same thing?” Mike tried to clarify. “You look for a tree or a river or a light, you’re going to see them all over the place.”

“Context matters,” Eddie said. “And symbols matter. You live long enough, Mike, you realize that there’s a whole world underneath the world that we see, and its symbols that tell you how to get around it.”

“Who
are
you guys?” Mike asked. “I mean, really?”

Eddie chuckled. “That’s a lot of story you’re asking about,” he said.

A distant bellow echoed through the labyrinth, and Mike wondered if the demons had broken through the iron door. “Can they follow us by smell?”

“The Hound can. The Baal, too, maybe, if our smell is distinctive enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means through a crowded city, maybe not, but through a labyrinth where almost no one ever goes, yeah, the Baal Zavuv might be able to sniff us out.”

Mike squeezed the grip of his pistol once to reassure himself that he still had it. “You’re not a rock band.”

“Sure we are,” Eddie said. “We’re a hard working rock band, too. It’s how we pay our way, limited engagements, strictly cash. Hell, we’re even
good,
in our fashion. New name for the band every gig, of course, so we’re harder to track, and that makes it impossible to build up a fan base, as does the fact that we can’t record.”

Mike rattled down stone steps. “And what’s with the tambourine?”

Eddie was quiet for a moment. “Everyone in this band,” he finally said, “has a bone to pick with Satan. The tambourine is mine.”

Mike almost laughed out loud. “Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?” he asked. “What does that even mean?”

“It means I’m the best damn tambourine player in the whole damn world,” Eddie said gruffly. “Bar none, nobody else is even close.”

Mike remembered the agent at Butcher’s and the pleading look in his eyes. “I still don’t get it.”

“What I wanted to be was the world’s best guitar player,” Eddie said. “I was okay, starting to make a name for myself in some of the bars around Chicago, but I needed to get much better, and much faster than I could on my own. I needed it for my kids, you understand? For my family. It wasn’t an ego thing, I didn’t want screaming fans or limousines or coke to snort off the backsides of expensive hookers. So I did like all the songs said. I let a hoodoo woman take me down to the crossroads.”

Mike stumbled and almost fell. “You mean you sold your soul to the devil?”

“Keep running!” Eddie was quiet again. “Yeah,” he continued, “only I screwed up.”

Mike said nothing to that. He’d screwed up plenty, himself.

“I told Old Scratch—or his errand boy, anyway, you hardly ever get to meet the poobah himself in person, not on Earth and not in Hell, either—that I wanted to be the world’s best rock and roll
musician
. Damn me, if I’d just said
guitar player
it would have been all right. Instead, I sold my soul and just about lost my sanity, and all I got for it is that I’m the world’s most amazing genius at rock and roll
tambourine
.”

Mike gulped. “Lost your sanity?” he was ahead of Eddie, and after the story he’d just heard, didn’t feel really comfortable looking back.

“Out of my left eye,” Eddie said, in a voice that sounded like gravel and razor wire, “I see Hell. All the time. And when I sleep, I dream my death.”

“Mierda,”
Mike muttered. He thought of Chuy and shuddered.

“One thing you’ll learn quick in this band,” Eddie added somberly, “if you ain’t learned it already, is that Satan’s got game.”

Abruptly they caught up to the others. At a final arch, the labyrinth ended, and they found themselves standing on a rough sandstone shelf under an immense stone overhang. Off to their right, Mike could see what looked like a dark-walled canyon, its depths choked with boulders and desert scrub, and a few winking stars peeping down on it from above. The light of the stars and moon was silvery and faint, but it gave Mike more ability to see than he’d had since they’d slammed the trapdoor shut in the synagogue, and he was grateful for it.

In front of them, below the overhang, lay a long strip of packed sand. At the far end of the sandbar, maybe as much as half a mile away, was a brick building. It looked like a cube that narrowed as it rose, like a ziggurat or a pyramid with its tip knocked off.

Mike smelled water.

“That’s gotta be it,” Eddie guessed, shining his flashlight on the stone structure.

From within the labyrinth, Mike heard the squealing of the Baal Zavuv and the roaring of the Hellhound.

“Let’s not stop here,” he said, and followed Jim, who was already trotting toward the pyramid.

***

Chapter Seven

Jim and Eddie both shone their flashlights around the overhanging stone as they walked, and Mike looked up. The moon- and star-light didn’t reach the stone, but what he saw in the splashes of Maglite beam took his breath away.

The entire underside of the cliff was scratched and scarred with petroglyphs. Some formed distinct scenes, and at a walking pace Mike couldn’t really figure out what was being portrayed. There were definitely monsters and battles and big beasties inside cages, and some of the creatures carved into the stone were reminiscent of the dragons and angels he’d seen in the tapestries in the synagogue above. He wondered how old the synagogue was, and then he wondered if it really was a synagogue. There was even one picture that looked like an angel riding a dragon underneath a river of water, all done in ancient stick-figure style.

There was writing, too, definitely. Mike was no expert, and he didn’t recognize the alphabet, but there was row after row of what could only be words and letters. Some of it, he thought, looked suspiciously like Egyptian hieroglyphs, maybe a little stylized. Zig-zaggy lines, dogs lying down, people with their arms raised over their heads. Someone, a long, long time ago, had spent a lot of time and effort carving this rock.

Below all the writing, greenery clung to the rock, which reflected the beams of the flashlight like it was wet.

Jim stopped at the base of the brick pyramid and the others caught up. The pyramid was bigger than it had looked from the labyrinth exit. A
kiva,
Mike thought they called these things when they were in old Pueblo or the Anasazi ruins. Only kivas were small, like sweat lodges. This was a super-kiva. If Donald Trump built a kiva, it would look like this.

“What is that stuff?” Mike panted, and pointed at the ceiling.

Eddie ran his flashlight across the overhang again. “Writing,” he said. “And pictures.”

“No kidding.” Mike’s side ached. “But I mean … who wrote it?”

“Someone who’s dead now.” The guitar player ran his light over the structure. A sort of ladder, consisting of a single straight tree trunk with rungs lashed crosswise to it, leaned up against the side of the building, not quite reaching the top. The wood looked as dried out as could be and the lashings were made of dry wiry grass. Mike resolved not to trust the ladder with his weight, no matter what. Under the light’s beam he could see that the sides weren’t totally sheer anyway, but rose steeply in narrow steps. The super-kiva was climbable.

Jim kept walking, around the base of the pyramid, shining his flashlight at the ground and inspecting it.

“Not necessarily,” Twitch contradicted him.

“Looks similar to proto-Eblaite,” Adrian squinted. “Or Reformed Egyptian. My guess is it’s one of the Primals, though of course you can write with any alphabet.”

“You can?” Mike asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “This is the place.”

“What do you mean, one of the Primals?” Mike felt dizzier with each new rush of information, though he was well through the looking glass at this point and no longer questioned anything he was told, not really. With the Hellhound and Baal Zavuv on his tail, skepticism didn’t seem likely to contribute to his survival. “What place is this?”

“The Primals are the three original languages spoken on this planet at the moment of the Fall of Adam,” Adrian said. “Really, they’re dialects of the same language, but you say potato … you know.”

Mike groped to understand. “What do you mean … like, Latin?” he asked.

Eddie laughed sourly. “Latin is a late arrival on the scene. Latin is practically
modern
. You can study Latin in
high school.”

“I mean Angelic,” Adrian said, “and Infernal, and Adamic.”

“You speak these languages?”

Adrian chuckled. Mike thought his laugh sounded a little condescending, and if he hadn’t been so exhausted, he might have bristled a little. “Oh, no. No human being has been able to speak or understand the Primals for thousands of years. Not since the Tower of Babel. We’re not
capable
of it, not since we were cursed.”

“Nor are
we
,” Twitch added. “For entirely different reasons.”

“We?” Mike fumbled. “Who’s
we
?”

“As for what this place is,” Eddie said, “this is the place we came looking for. This is Dudael.” He cleared his throat and spoke again in his recitative chanting voice. “And the Lord said to Raphael: bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness! And he made a hole in the desert which was in Dudael and cast him there; he threw on top of him rugged and sharp rocks. And he covered his face in order that he may not see light; and in order that he may be sent into the fire on the great day of judgment.”

“That in the Bible again?” Mike asked. He remembered Adrian had said that Azazel was Satan.

“Nah,” Eddie said, “but it should be.”

Mike looked up at the overhanging stone, so vast that the super-kiva was almost inside a cave. “That’s a rugged rock,” he agreed, “and I guess the sun hasn’t ever shone inside here.” Then he made another connection. “Raphael!”

“A good sign,” the boy chirped. He wouldn’t meet Mike’s eyes and just stood there with his hands in his pockets. Well, no wonder, the poor kid was certainly having the worst day of his life, worse than anything he could ever have imagined.

Like the day Chuy died had been, for Mike.

Then another thought occurred to him and he jumped back from the brick building. “But—Satan! Azazel!”

Eddie chuckled. “Don’t worry, His Lowness broke out of this particular hoosegow ages ago.”

“So it’s safe?”

“Oh, hell no. But you’re not going to meet Satan today.”

From back inside the labyrinth, Mike heard the roar of the Hellhound and the bellow of the Baal Zavuv. They sounded closer than before.

“Unless you die,” Adrian added. “You do, after all, have the Hand on you.”

“Thanks,” Mike said, and shuddered. “That’s cheerful.”

“That’s our Adrian,” Twitch grinned. “A little ray of sunshine. Et cetera.”

Mike almost chuckled at Twitch’s jab. “Now what?” he asked.

“Now,” Eddie told him, “you help us look for a bit of hoof.”

“Like a horse’s hoof?” Mike looked at Twitch, without meaning to.

“More like a goat’s,” Eddie said. “A really
big
goat.”

Adrian looked up at the overhang, pressing the little glass lens to his eye. “No, there are plenty of wards on the stone here, but they’re all broken. We’re on a fool’s errand. If it was here, just lying in the sand, Satan would have found it long ago.”

“Unless there’s some other reason Lucifer can’t see it.” Eddie ambled off, scanning the ground.

“I don’t get it,” Mike said. He stumbled after Eddie, and the boy Rafael trailed in his wake. Eddie moved slowly around the base of the building, shining his light on the sand and scuffing at it with the toe of his boot. Behind the building, in Eddie’s light, Mike now saw that the water trickling down the back of the overhang gathered into a channel, lined with brick, and flowed into a hole in the wall of the kiva. Mike thought hard as he walked, trying to stitch the pieces together in his mind. “It can’t be a real goat’s hoof. Are you telling me that we’re here looking for
a piece of Satan
?”

“In fact, I don’t think I did tell you that,” Eddie said. “But it’s still true. I’m glad you’re paying attention. You’re much more likely to survive if you do.”

“Huevos.”

“Pretty much.”

Rafi closed in behind Mike and grabbed his free hand. “But … how long has it been here?” Mike asked. “How … how do you know it’s here? How … how…?”

Eddie continued moving and examining the ground. The super-kiva, Mike realized as he stood directly under it, was much bigger than he had at first thought. It really was like one of the pyramids, cropped at the top and uprooted into nowhere, New Mexico.

“It’s been here since his escape,” Eddie said matter-of-factly. “Call it six thousand years, in round numbers. No one realized it because, naturally, His Lowness wanted to keep the vulnerability a secret. Jim found out it was here, back when Jim was in Hell’s good graces. Or rather, its bad graces.”

“Vulnerability?”

“You heard about voodoo dolls?”

“I watch TV.”

Eddie snorted. “Imagine the possibilities.”

Mike did, and felt troubled. What could someone achieve who had the power to harm, or maybe kill, Satan? The blackmail opportunities seemed vast. And what if someone with the hoof could do more than that? What if he could actually
control
the Prince of Darkness? Mike gulped. “How can it still be here after all that time? And how can we possibly find a bit of hoof?”

Jim whistled, fingers in his mouth, and Eddie looked up at him. Jim waved an arm at the building and started marching toward it. Eddie turned to look at the brick too, pulling at it with his fingers to test its stability.

Mike heard another Hellhound roar. Eddie seemed not to have noticed.

“It can still be here,” Eddie explained, “if for thousands of years, a long line of canny old Hebrew priests has been carefully watching over it, keeping it hidden with wards of obfuscation and other tricks.”

“Hebrews in New Mexico?” Mike scoffed. “Thousands of years ago?”

“Those guys get around,” Eddie shook his head. “You’d be surprised. And I
don’t
expect you and me to find it.” He twisted off his flashlight, let the shotgun hang down from his shoulder and started to climb up the side of the building.

“Then why are we wasting our time?”

“I expect
Jim
to find it,” Eddie continued. “He’s got something of a connection with it, after all. And if it isn’t him, it’ll be Adrian. Using voodoo doll principles, if he can manage to do it without taking a surprise nap.”

Mike gave the boy Rafi a boost, shoving him up the side of the pyramid. He scrambled like a monkey, and Mike followed like a bull, plodding on all fours up the side of the brick. To his surprise, it bore his weight without crumbling or shifting. The solidity of the brick made him wonder a bit about the story Eddie was telling him; he didn’t think the super-kiva could possibly be six thousand years old.

Eddie and Rafi were both between him and the curtain of starlight over the canyon below, so they were silhouettes to him, scaling the side of the pyramid much surer and faster than Mike could.

“Why wouldn’t the Hebrew priests give the hoof back?” Mike asked, puffing.

“To Satan?”

“I mean to … to Heaven.” Mike scratched his head. “I guess that’s not really giving it
back
, is it?”

Eddie shrugged. “Maybe they did. Or maybe Heaven wouldn’t want it back, like trying to give the White House a chunk of radioactive waste, or a block of kryptonite to Superman. Or maybe Heaven
would
want it, but the priests were too smart to give it to them. Some of this stuff is just beyond me, and I sort of figure it always will be. I’m a practical man, with limited objectives.”

“Why would holding it back make any sense?” Mike asked. “I mean, if it’s like a voodoo doll, couldn’t Heaven use the bit of hoof to trap Satan again? Or have power over him, somehow?”

“I guess that’s my point,” Eddie stopped to wipe sweat from his forehead. “Maybe it’s better for everyone if Heaven
can’t
do that. Maybe it’s better if there’s an opposition, even if it’s …” he hesitated, “ugly. But I might be talking out my backside, sometimes I can’t tell.”

“Don’t you want to get rid of Hell?” Mike asked, remembering Eddie’s wandering eye and the grim sound of his voice when the guitar player had said he saw Hell out of his left eye perpetually.

“No,” Eddie shook his head slowly and spoke with quiet determination. “I don’t want to go to Hell myself, but I sure think some people belong there.”

All three of them reached the top of the pyramid at the same time as Jim. Rafi and Eddie looked tired and Mike felt exhausted; Jim looked totally unfazed by the climb. Adrian and Twitch still stood at the bottom, Adrian staring at the brick building through his lens and Twitch talking to him.

“What do you mean,” Mike asked uneasily, looking from Eddie to Jim and back, “when you say that Jim used to be in
Hell’s good graces
?”

Eddie turned to look at Jim; Jim nodded.

“It all has to do with the reason that the rebel angels fell,” Eddie explained slowly. He started reciting again: “They took wives unto themselves, and everyone chose one woman for himself, and they began to go unto them. And they taught them magical medicine, incantations, the cutting of roots, and taught them plants. And the women became pregnant and gave birth to great giants.”

The stone overhang felt very close, and loomed over Mike’s head like it wanted to crush him; the ground below felt very far away, and seemed to be spinning. “The angels had children.” He took a deep breath. “With human women.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Jim’s not a giant.” Mike gulped, and then glanced quickly at the big Viking-looking singer who loomed over him. “Well, sort of, he is.”

“Sort of, he is,” Eddie agreed. “And sort of, so is Twitch.”

“Twitch?”

Something silver flashed in the corner of Mike’s vision. Mike only saw it for a split second, but if pressed, he would have sworn he’d seen a big silver bird, like a hawk or an eagle, swooping to alight on top of the pyramid. Only the eagle, he would have sworn, had a long tassel flying in the wind behind it, like the tail of a horse.

He turned, and Twitch was standing there.

“Yes, Mikey?” she said.

“What
are
you?” he asked. He was so thrown off by the entire conversation, he barely noticed her calling him ‘Mikey.’
Rafi grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” she chuckled, her white tail swishing merrily back and forth. “Some would say I’m one of the fair folk.”

“Descended from rebel angels?”

Twitch snorted. “Oh, that’s what some of the
Fallen
say, but they say that about practically
everyone.
Everyone who’s anyone, at least. Who knows, really? Semyaz goes around tooting his horn that he’s Osiris’s father, but you don’t see Osiris sending the crusty old bastard Father’s Day cards, do you?”